iPod touch and iPod nano could become iPad mini and iPad nano

With Apple just a few days away from introducing new iPods, here’s a thought: could the iPod be done for instead? The “iPod” brand name, while wildly successful in its time, is nine years old – and no one thinks of the iPod as being a hot or trendy product anymore, as Apple’s own iPhone and iPad have sucked all the excitement out of a product that five years ago was about as cutting edge as you could get. So how is it that the “iPod” might suddenly go away? Take a look at the current iPod lineup for clues.

The awkwardly named “iPod touch” isn’t even really an iPod in the traditional sense. Depending on ones viewpoint, it’s either an iPhone without any phone or mobile networking abilities, or it’s a three inch iPad. So why does it even bear the iPod brand name, when it bears almost nothing in common with the classic iPod beyond the fact that it plays music? So let’s say the “new iPod touch” ends up instead carrying a name like iPad mini.

The latest rumors from CBS have the iPod nano as we know it being replaced by something that looks like a half-size iPod touch, touch screen and all. There’s still a plenty of life left in the “iPod nano” brand name, but if you’re going to rebrand things, might as well go all the way. So would a “touchscreen iPod nano” instead become an iPad micro?

An then there’s the iPod classic, which still more or less sports the same click-wheel interface which surfaced back in 2004 and is an embarrassingly outdated product by Apple’s standards. Many (including us) expect the sole remaining hard drive-based Apple mobile product to go away entirely once the flash-based iPod touch (ahem, iPad mini?) finally reaches similar capacity levels – which could happen this week.

The iPod shuffle? Here’s the one iPod model that seems unlikely to be either canceled or rebranded. For one thing, it’s Apple’s only sub-$100 music player, and it would only likely go away if the iPod nano were about to drop to the $99 price point itself – which seems doubtful if the nano is indeed about to go touchscreen. And it would be difficult to find a way to rope the iPod shuffle into the iPad lineup (iPad invisa?) without really stretching for it.

But you never know. Apple intentionally took the iPod’s buzz factor away when it launched the iPhone in 2007, and the iPod has become even more of an afterthought in a year in which the iPad feels like the future while the iPod sounds like something you’d buy for your kid. Maybe now is too soon to pull the trigger. And perhaps throwing away altogether the cache still remaining in the iPod brand name would be foolish anyway. But it is interesting that the most exciting talk about this week’s possible new “iPod” products generally involves them becoming less like the iPod we once knew, and more like Apple’s other, hipper product lines whose brand name still sounds current.